"Ye'll be knowin' that weel enough, I'm thinkin'. Whaur's Indian Jules and the Cambon man? Maybe ye can tell me that! Aiblins ye'd better not, though. I'll gie ye fair warnin' that whatever ye say'll be used against ye."

There seemed to be nothing for it but an unconditional surrender. Prime looked the posse over appraisively as the men composing it moved forward into the circle of firelight. The under-sheriff was what his speech declared him to be – a Scotchman; stubby, square-built, clean-shaven, with a graying fringe of hair over his ears, a hard-lined mouth, shrewd eyes under penthouse brows, and a portentous official frown. His posse men were apparently either "river hogs" or saw-mill hands – rough-looking young fellows giving the impression that they would obey orders with small regard for consequences. Prime saw nothing hopeful in the Scotchman's face, but it occurred to him that a too easy yielding might be construed as an admission of guilt.

"I take it that a false arrest and imprisonment is actionable in Canada, as well as in the United States," he threw out coolly, helping Lucetta to her feet. "We'll be glad to have you take us with you – but not as prisoners." And thereupon he briefed for the square-built one the story of the kidnapping and its results.

"And ye're expectin' me to believe any such fule's rubbish as that?" snapped the Scotchman wrathfully when the tale was told.

"You can believe it or not, as you choose; it is the plain truth. We'll go along with you cheerfully, and be grateful enough to you or to anybody who will show us the way out of this wilderness. But, as to the crime you are charging us with, there isn't a particle of evidence, and you know it."

"There's evidence to hang the baith of ye! Ye've admitted that the half-breeds are baith deid; and John Baptist will sweer that ye had their canoe and Cambon's gun. For the matter o' that, ye're not denyin' it, yerself."

"We are merely wasting time," put in Prime quietly. "You evidently have no wish to be convinced; and if you are willing to take the chance of making a false arrest you may have your own way. Let me say first, though, that this lady is just recovering from a severe attack of fever, and you will be held strictly accountable if you make her endure any unreasonable hardships."

"'Tis not for you to make terms," was the irascible rejoinder, and then to his men: "Tie their hands, and we'll be goin'."

"One moment," Prime interposed; and stooping swiftly he caught up the rifle. "You may do anything you please to me, but the first man who lays a hand on the lady is going to get himself killed."

The under-sheriff screwed out a bleak smile at the naïve simplicity of the threat. "And if we say 'Yes,' and truss you up first," he suggested, "what'll ye be doin' then?"

"I shall take your word for it as from one gentleman to another," was Prime's quick concession, and with that he dropped the gun and held out his hands.

They bound him securely with buckskin thongs, and at a word from the Scotchman the camp dunnage was gathered up, the fire trodden out, and a shift was made to the river-bank. A three-quarter moon, riding high, showed the two captives a large birchbark drawn out upon the sands. The embarkation was quickly accomplished, the under-sheriff planting himself amidships with his two prisoners, and the four posse-men taking the paddles as if they had been bred to it.

After an hour or more of swift downstream gliding the current quickened and a sound like the wind sweeping through the tree-tops warned the voyagers that they were approaching a rapid. At this the canoe was sent ashore and the Scotchman changed places with his bow-man, letting the change stand even after the slight hazard of quick water was passed. Prime soon saw that his new guard was nodding, and bent to whisper to his fellow captive:

"This is mighty hard for you – after yesterday and last night," he protested. "Can't you shift a little and lean against me?"

"I am doing quite well," was the low-toned answer. And then: "What is going to come of all this, Donald?"

"We shall get out of the woods for one thing. And for another we are going to hope that a real court will not be so obstinately suspicious as this Scotchman. But, whatever lies ahead, we must just stand by and face it out – together. They can't punish us for a crime that we didn't commit."

There was silence for another half-hour, and then Lucetta whispered again.

"Which pocket is your penknife in?" she asked.

"The right-hand pocket of my waistcoat. What are you going to do?"

"I am going to cut the thongs. It is barbarously cruel for them to leave you tied this way!"

"No," he forbade. "That would only make matters worse. The buckskin is not hurting me much. Lean your head against my shoulder and see if you can't get a little sleep."

At the morning breakfast halt Prime tried to extract a bit of geographical information from the Scotchman. It was given grudgingly. During the night they had passed from their own river to the larger Rivière du Lièvres and they were still twenty-four hours or more from their destination – a place with a long French name that Prime did not catch and which the Scotchman would not repeat. For the first time in their wanderings the two castaways ate a meal that they had not prepared for themselves; and Prime, observing anxiously, was glad to note that Lucetta's wilderness appetite seemed to be returning.

Throughout the day, during which the crew took turns paddling and sleeping, the big birch-bark held to its down-stream course. But now the scenery was changing with each fresh looping of the crooked river, the River of the Hares. Recent timber-cuttings appeared; the river broadened into lake-like reaches; here and there upon the banks there were lumber camps; in the afternoon a small town was passed, and later the site of another that had been destroyed by a landslide.

With an eye single to his purpose, the Scotchman made no noon stop, and the supper fire was built on the right-hand bank of the broadened stream at a spot where there were no signs of human habitation. As at the breakfast, Prime's bonds were taken off to permit him to feed himself, and when the voyage was resumed they were not put on again.

"The wumman tells me ye can't swim, and I'm takin' her word for it," was the gruff explanation. "If ye go overboard in the night, I'll juist lat ye droon."

With his hands free, Prime asked if he might smoke. The permission was given, and, since they had confiscated Prime's store of tobacco with the remainder of the dunnage, the Scotchman opened his heart and his tobacco-pouch in the prisoner's behalf, filling his own pipe at the same time. When the dottles were glowing, the under-sheriff thawed another degree or so.

"D'ye mean to tell me that ye're goin' to hold to that rideeculous story of yours in the coort?" he questioned. "It may do for auld Sandy Macdougal, the under-sheriff; but ye'll no be expectin' a jury to listen till it."

Prime laughed soberly. "I wish, for your sake and our own, Mr. Macdougal, that we had a more believable story to tell. But facts are hard matters to evade. Things have happened to us precisely as I have tried to tell you. We were drugged in Quebec and abducted – carried off in an air-machine, as well as we can reason it out – and that is all there is to it. We don't know any more than you do what we were kidnapped for – or by whom."

"Weel, ye're a main lang ways from Quebec the noo – some twa hunnerd miles or mair. And ye're not dressed for the timmer."

"Hardly," said Prime.

Macdougal jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward Lucetta. "Is the wumman yer wife?"

"No; we are distant cousins, though we had never met before the morning when we found ourselves on the shore of the big lake."

"Ye mean that ye were strangers to each ither?"

"Just that. Up to that moment neither had known of the existence of the other."

The Scotchman stared hard at Prime from beneath his shaggy brows.

"Young man, ye'll juist be tellin' me what's yer business, when ye're not trollopin' round in the timmer with a young wumman that's yer cousin, and that ye never saw or heard of before."

"I am a fiction-writer," Prime admitted, not without some little anxiety as to the effect the statement might have upon the hard-headed under-sheriff.

"Ou, ay! That's it, is it? A story-writer? And, besides that, ye're the biggest fule leevin' to tell it to me. Ye'll no be expectin' me to believe anything ye're sayin', after that! A novel-writer – losh!"

"One of the greatest Scotchmen the world ever saw was a novel-writer," Prime ventured to suggest.

"And it's varra little to his credit, let me tell ye that, young man! 'Tis mair becomin' to Sir Walter that he was sheriff depute o' Selkirkshire and clerk o' session for abune twenty-five year on end. That's a canty story for ye!"

Prime saw that he was making no headway with the Macdougal, and after the pipes were out he tried to compose himself to sleep. Some time later on, Macdougal changed places with one of the paddlers, and, seizing her opportunity, Lucetta crept back to take her place beside Prime. They talked in whispers for a while, each trying to cheer the other. The morning of new and more threatening involvements was only a short night distant, and in the light of the month of hardship and mystery they could only fear the worst and hope for the best.

"You must try to get what sleep you can," Prime urged at the last, arranging the nearest blanket-roll for her back-support. "We shall be up against it again in the morning, and we both ought to have clear heads and a good, cold nerve. Snuggle down and shut your eyes. I am going to do the same after I've smoked another pipe."

He kept his word, dropping off shortly after the big canoe had entered a long straight reach with twinkling lights on either shore to prove that the moving world was once more coming within shouting distance. How long he slept he did not know, but when he awoke the canoe was stopped in midstream, and was lying stem to stern beside a larger craft, in the hold of which throbbing machinery seemed to be running idle.

Vaguely he gathered the impression that the canoe had been held up by the motorcraft; then he realized that a fierce altercation was going on between a big man who was leaning over the side to grip the gunwale of the birch bark and Under-sheriff Macdougal.

"I'll fight it out with you in any court you like, you stubborn blockhead!" Prime heard the big man bellow at Macdougal, and then the canoe was passed swiftly aft, somebody reached over the side and lifted him bodily into the cockpit of the motorboat, and a moment later he found Lucetta beside him, staring wildly and clinging to him as if he were her only hope.

"Wha-what are they doing to us now?" she quavered, and as she spoke the grumbling machinery in the depths below roared a louder note, and the big motor-craft cut a careening half-circle in midstream, leaving the birch-bark to dance and wabble in the converging area of the furrowing bow wave. By this time Prime had shaken himself fully awake. The two deck-hands who had pulled him and Lucetta aboard had disappeared, and the big man who had been bullying Macdougal was at the wheel. There was a single electric bulb in the centre of the cockpit awning, and by its light Prime had his first good look at the big steersman.

"Grider!" he exploded, taking a step toward the man at the wheel; and at that Miss Lucetta Millington drew herself up icily and turned her back.

XX
WATSON GRIDER

Prime had often made his fictional heroes "see red" in exceptionally vigorous crises, and he was now able to verify the colorful figure of speech in his own proper person. Like a submerging wave the recollection of all that the heartless joke might have meant to a pair of helpless victims – of all that it had actually entailed in hardships and peril and sickness – rushed over him as he faced the handsome young giant at the wheel of the motor-cruiser.

"So it was you, after all!" he gritted. Then: "There are some few things that won't keep, Grider. Put this boat ashore where we can have a little more room. The account between us is too long to wait for daylight!"

The barbarian's answer to this was a shout of derisive laughter, and he made a show of putting the small steering-wheel between himself and his belligerent passenger.

"Give me time, Don – just a little time to take it all in!" he gurgled. "Oh, my sainted grandmother! what a perfectly ripping fling you must have had, to make you turn loose all holds like this! And the lady – won't you – won't you introduce me?"

Lucetta faced about, and, if a look could have crippled, the motor-cruiser would have lost its steersman.

"Cousin Donald has tried to tell me about you, but the reality is worse than he or anybody could put into words!" she broke out in indignant scorn. "Of all the inhuman, dastardly things that have ever been done in the name of a practical joke, yours is certainly the climax, Mr. Grider!"

The young man at the wheel pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle; then he appeared to comprehend suddenly and went off in another gust of Hudibrastic mirth.

"I've been figuring it all out as I came along up river," he choked; "how you had tried to account for yourselves to each other – how you had been wrestling with the lack of all the little civilized knickknacks and notions – how you'd look when you came out. Excuse me, but your – your clothes, you know; you're a pair to make a wooden idol hold his sides and chortle himself to death!"

This seemed to be adding insult to injury, and by this time Prime was speechless, Berserk-mad, as he himself would have written it. Nothing but Lucetta's restraining hand upon his arm kept him from hurling himself, reckless of consequences, upon the heartless jester. When he could control his symptoms sufficiently to find a few coherent words, he contrived to ease the soul-nausea – in some small measure.

"There is another day coming, Grider; don't you lose sight of that for a single minute!" he raged. "I'm not saying anything about myself; perhaps I have given you cause to assume that you can pull off your brutal initiation stunts on me whenever you feel like it. That's all right, but you've overdone the thing this time. Miss Millington's quarrel is my quarrel. If I can't get you in any other way, I'll post you in every club you belong to as the man who plays horse-laugh jokes on women!"

At this outburst Grider only laughed again, appearing to be entirely and quite joyously impervious to either scorn or red rage.

"Perhaps I do owe you both an apology – not for the joke – that is too ripping good to be spoiled – but for breaking your night's rest in that peppery Scotchman's birch-bark," he offered. "If you'll duck under the raised deck, you'll find two dog-kennel staterooms. The port-side kennel is yours, Don, and the other is Miss Millington's. Suppose you turn in and get your nap out. To-morrow morning, if you still feel in the humor for it, you can get together and give me what you seem to think is coming to me. Shoo! I can't steer this boat and play skittles with you at the same time. Run along to bed – both of you!"

With such a case-hardened barbarian for a host, there seemed to be nothing else to be done, and Prime took Lucetta's arm and helped her down into the tiny cabin. It was lighted, and the doors of the two box-like staterooms were open. Prime felt for the button on the jamb of the right-hand door and Lucetta's sleeping-niche sprang alight. She looked in and gave a little cry of astonishment.

"My suitcases!" she exclaimed; "the ones I left in the Quebec hotel!"

Prime snapped the opposite switch and looked on his own side. "My auto trunk, too," he conceded sourly. "We didn't need any more evidence, but this is conclusive. Grider has had his horse-laugh, and the least he could do in the wind-up was to bring us our belongings. I suppose we are compelled to be indebted to him for getting us out of the scrape with Macdougal, much as it goes against the grain; but to-morrow we'll settle with him."

Lucetta braced herself in her doorway against the surge and swing of the racing cruiser.

"He doesn't look like a man who could be so wholly lost to all sense of – of the fitness of things, Donald," she ventured, as one who would not be immitigably vindictive.

"He looks, and acts, like a wild ass of the desert!" Prime stormed, in a fresh access of resentment. And then: "You'd best go to bed and get what sleep you can. Heaven only knows what new piece of buffoonery will be sprung upon us to-morrow morning."

She looked up with the adorable little grimace, a copy of which he had long since resolved to wish upon his next and most bewitching heroine.

"I believe you are angry yet," she chided, half in mockery. "I like you best when you don't scowl so ferociously, Cousin Donald. You forget that we have agreed that it wasn't all bad. Good night." And she closed her door.

Turning out of his box-berth the next morning, Prime found the sun shining broadly in at the stateroom port-light. The motorboat was at rest and the machinery was stopped. A bath, a shave, and a complete change to fresh haberdashery made him feel somewhat less pugnacious, and stumbling up the companion to the cockpit he saw that the cruiser was tied up at a wharf on the river fringe of a considerable city; saw, also, that Lucetta, likewise renewed as to her outward appearance, was awaiting him.

"Where is Grider?" he demanded shortly.

"He has gone somewhere to get an auto to take us to a hotel."

"What city is this?"

"It is Ottawa. Don't you see the government buildings up there on the hill?"

Prime was silent for a moment. Then he said: "He needn't think he is going to smooth it all over by showing us a few little neighborly attentions. We are back in the good old civilized world once more, and we are not asking any favors of Watson Grider."

"Oh, I shouldn't feel that way, if I were you," she qualified. "He seems very humble and penitent this morning, though he is still twinkly-eyed, and I couldn't make him talk much. He said we'd want to be having our breakfast, and – "

"We don't breakfast with him," was the crabbed rejoinder.

"Why, Donald!" she protested, in a laughing mockery of deprecatory concern. "I believe you are still angry. You really mustn't hold spite, that way. It isn't nice – or Bankhead-y."

He looked her fairly in the eyes. "Don't begin by throwing the old minister ancestor up at me, Lucetta. I can't help the grouch, and I don't know as I want to help it. Every time I think of you lying there under the big spruces, sick and discouraged, suffering for the commonest necessities and with no possible chance of getting them, I want to go out and swear like a pirate and murder somebody. Why doesn't he bring that auto, if he is going to?"

As if the impatient demand had evoked him, Grider appeared on the wharf and beckoned to them. Prime helped his companion up to the string-piece, and had only a scowl for their late host as Grider led the way to the street and a waiting auto. The barbarian stood aside while Prime was putting Lucetta into the car and clambering in after her. Then he took the seat beside the driver, and no word was said until the car was stopped before the entrance of an up-town hotel, where Grider got down to open the tonneau door for the pair on the rear seat.

"You'll want to have your first civilized breakfast by yourselves and I shan't butt in," he offered good-naturedly. "Later on, say about ten o'clock, I'll be glad to see you both in the ladies' parlor – if you can forgive me that far."

Prime made no reply, but after they were seated in the comfortable breakfast-room and were revelling in their surroundings and in the efficient service he broke out again.

"Grider still has his brass-bound nerve with him; to ask us to meet him! I'd see him in kingdom come first, if I wasn't spoiling to tell him a few things."

"Perhaps he wishes to try to explain," came from the less vindictive side of the table-for-two. "Think a moment, Cousin Donald: you two have been friends and college chums, and – and Mr. Grider has been brotherly good to you in times past, hasn't he? And I don't want you to quarrel with him."

"Why don't you?"

"Because you have said enough to make me understand that you are doing it for my sake. That won't answer at all, you know."

"I don't see why it won't," Prime objected with sudden obtuseness.

"For the best possible reason; there is another woman to be considered. Sooner or later she will hear that you have broken with your best friend on account of a – a person she has never even heard of, and there will be consequences."

"Oh, if that is all" – and then he laughed. "You are either the most childlike bit of femininity the world has ever seen – or the most wilfully blind, Lucetta."

"'Cousin Lucetta,'" she corrected. "We are back among the conventions, now."

He took the implied readjustment of their relations rather hard.

"That wasn't worthy of you," he protested warmly. "We have been too much to each other in the past month to go back of the returns in that way, don't you think?"

"I can tell better what I think after I have climbed down into my little groove in the girls' school," she returned half-absently, and beyond this the talk concerned itself with their plans for the immediate future, Prime still insisting that he meant to see his table companion safely home and setting the difficulties and objections aside as one who had a perfect right to do so.

When the leisurely meal was finished Prime pushed his chair back and glanced at his watch.

"It is nearly ten o'clock," he announced. "Shall we go and meet Grider? Or shall we give him the cold shoulder he so richly deserves and go hunt up the railroad timetables? It is for you to say."

She decided instantly.

"I think we ought to go and hear what Mr. Grider has to say for himself. We owe him that much for rescuing us from that terrible old Scotch under-sheriff."

And together they sought the hotel parlors.